New York Knicks seats aren't generally available to mere mortals. The team has sold out more than 325 consecutive games, and more than 17,500 of Madison Square Garden's 19,763 basketball seats are held by season ticket holders. A ticket for courtside has a $220 face value, and seats sold through online auctions, ticket brokers, or scalpers can command a premium of 100 percent or more. Understandably, someone who lays down a few hundred dollars for a ticket wants to know if the goods are legit -- because not all of them are.

Most antiforgery technologies -- like holograms, ultraviolet coatings, opalescent inks, foil embossing, and special card stock -- come from the concert business, in which bands like Phish have made a crusade of outsmarting forgers and scalpers. With most of the above, gatekeepers and skeptical buyers just need to give the tickets a hard look in good light.

But this season a Knicks ticket can be checked for authenticity even on a dim street corner: if it tears anywhere but at the proper perforation, it's a fake. That's because they're printed on a synthetic paper called Yupo, which was developed by Japan's Oji-Yuka Synthetic Paper Company for maps, outdoor advertising, children's books, medical devices, and other things that shouldn't tear. (Oji-Yuka's U.S. subsidiary, Yupo, manufactures the tickets for the basketball team.) The manufacturer claims that the paper, which is made of extruded polypropylene and calcium carbonate, is also waterproof, scuff-resistant, and recyclable.

It's hard to tell if this is a solution in search of a problem, since basketball officials get cagey when asked about phony tickets. The National Basketball Association says only that counterfeit tickets and merchandise are a multimillion-dollar business; Knicks marketing manager Steve Capellini declines to put numbers on his team's losses to forgery. "We have a bigger problem with counterfeiting than most NBA teams," he admits; he also says that the Knicks are the first NBA team to implement a full-court press against fakes. The new tickets cost the team a little more to print, but they protect a buyer's investment. "We're just trying to do the right thing by the fans," Mr. Capellini says.